Advertisers seek to connect with their customers in the fullest way possible. Conventionally, this has been done by attempting to make an advertisement, such as a television commercial, humorous or alluring. For an even fuller experience, advertisers will run a commercial, or “infomercial,” for an entire half hour, often featuring a celebrity to keep the customer's attention.
No matter how alluring the content or how long the commercial, however, such conventional advertising is severely limited because the customers have no incentive to keep watching except for their own fickle curiosity. In addition, the simple viewing of an advertisement is not an interactive experience between the advertiser and the potential customer. Many advertisers, especially those offering complex products, require a dialogue with their potential customers. They need to have a conversation with their potential customers to find out their immediate needs and answer their questions in order to sell them products.
To solve these limitations and make advertisements more interactive, advertisers have resorted to inviting customers to attend live seminars in person and paying them for their time. Often the payment will take the form of a reward, such as receiving a gas grill for attending a seminar on time-share vacation homes. The customers become “participants,” as the advertisers ask them their opinions and questions as they sell them products ranging from encyclopedias to cars.
These live sales seminars achieve the full interactivity that advertisers seek with their customers. The problem with the seminars is all their logistics must be done by hand. Customers must be selected and invited to the seminar. The customers must travel to the location of the seminar. Both the customers and the advertisers must be in the same location at the same, pre-arranged time. The reward to attend the seminar, and the total attendance time required, must be fixed and agreed to beforehand, so that it is worth the trouble of travel. Payment must also be done manually, in accordance to the agreed reward. In summary, holding such live advertising seminars is quite difficult, and in many cases prohibitively expensive, because there is no device for enabling them.
Therefore, there remains a need to overcome one or more limitations in the above described existing art which is satisfied by the inventive structure and method described hereinafter.